Tools & Tips to Get Into Action Immediately Following #SESchi

Hopefully, by now, you have managed to fully assimilate the awesome tips and tactics shared at SES Chicago and have made some headway into growing your network of contacts via different social networks. If not, let Search Engine Watch (SEW) help give you a boost!

After a conference there is a lot of new information to take in, so immediate actions may not be obvious. However, networking should be top of your list, so start establishing contact with the people you met at the conference with whom you would like to stay in touch with. Also below are some personal impressions of what I found to be hot button topics at SESchi and some immediate takeaways of what you can do to push your skillset further today, all bundled with some handy guides to help get you started.

As Lee Odden put it, SES Chicago 2011 was the best ever. Audience attendance was the highest ever and our new venue at the Hyatt Regency seemed to make a huge difference to the atmosphere of the conference. There was a real buzz around the expo hall and in the sessions and one particularly nice touch was that the Hyatt Regency got down on the #seschi hashtag, welcoming people to the conference.

Twitter

The buzz at the conference was also reflected in the #SESchi Tweetwall, powered by the good folks at Ultraknowledge. Any tweet with the hashtag #seschi was projected onto a large screen so that attendees could follow the action happening on Twitter during the intervals.

Total Users: 1414 (The number of twitter users who tweeted about the event)

Total Followers: 3,958,891 (The combined number of followers from people who tweeted)

Total Impressions: 13,760,401 (The number of people who were exposed to tweets about the event)

The stats from the Tweetwall tell their own story about the social sharing lifecycle of a conference. As you can see from the graph below, buzz builds up 7 days before the event, ramping up to a peak on day 1 of the conference. Buzz is sustained until it tails off immediately after the event. The following monday, also sees a resurgence as new blogs posts and recaps appear. Perhaps an action for the next conference you attend is to see if you can target content to peaks in the sharing cycle?

The SESchi Tweetwall has a feature which means that you can find new Twitter users to follow who were at the event, and discover who they are following that you may not be. Simply enter your username into our Twitter user suggestion box, to run the analysis. Hopefully following them will provide more useful resources and they may even follow you back!

Linkedin

Personally speaking, I found that Linkedin was moved up the agenda for many marketers, with attendees suggesting to connect on Linkedin as much as they would normally suggest connecting on Twitter.

Certainly the SEW Linkedin group is becoming increasingly important to us as we have seen referral traffic grow month on month since they launched the new Share on Linkedin button and counter. With that in mind, the first thing I did when I got back to the office is plug all the business cards received into Linkedin and connect with attendees.

If you want to get some tips on how to make the best use of Linkedin, checkout these guides:

Google Plus

Naturally there was a fair amount of discussion about Google Plus and it's likely impact on online marketer's role. To my surprise there was also significant amount of skepticism towards Google+ with speakers such as Aaron Goldman unabashedly declaring zero interest in Google+, until they implement core features such as an easily shareable name space and stop continuously tweaking how the rel=author system works.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming sentiment was, like it or not, Google+ is something that all marketers are going to need to understand eventually, so we may swell start now. With that in mind, we have just setup our Google Plus brand page for Search Engine Watch and will start experimenting on building a community there.

Facebook

Also surprisingly, Facebook was not the talk of the town this year at SES Chicago but that may simply reflect the fact that it's a fairly mature platform now. However, there was plenty of useful discussion around Facebook ads which marketers seem to be more interested in getting to grips with as a sales channel.

Personally speaking, I always think of Facebook as the bar to hang out with friends whereas Twitter is the watercooler to chat with colleagues. So, in that vein, the first thing I did on the SEW Facebook group was post something irreverent, that might be an antidote to information overload - namely a video about a new trend in advertising. Yes, Catvertising.

If you want to get some tips on how to make the best use of Facebook, checkout these guides:

YouTube

I might be biased, as I frequently present on video marketing tactics and YouTube at SES conferences, but I swear interest in using video grows every single year. Many companies really seem to have got their head around video and are taking the right steps to enable video marketing as a means to promote their business. It was extremely refreshing to hear how advanced some companies had got in terms of offering video content and, in particular, how they had incorporated best practices around online video into the business culture of their organization.

Certainly from SEW's perspective, I am keen to give our own YouTube channel a boost next year and see if we there can be some interesting synergy between content created for Google+ that can simultaneously benefit our YouTube channel.

All of the above actions and reflections are simple, uncomplicated and not remotely ground breaking approaches to social media, but hopefully they will get you in action. Inertia is your enemy to social media success, so try to do little things now, because they will all eventually add up to big things.